Trade, Competition and Domestic Regulatory Policy presents a unique combination of analysis of both international trade and investment policies, and competition and regulatory policies. Increasingly, policymakers, businesses and the law and economics professions need to better understand how changes and policy developments in international trade and competition developed and how their interaction impacts on global business. In addition to providing a comprehensive analysis of the attempts of international trade theory and practice to deal with tariffs, non-tariff barriers, market distortions and failures to protect various kinds of property rights, this book contains a detailed treatment of how property rights protection, including intangible property rights are a critical element of ensuring open trade and competitive markets. It examines how these rights have developed over time, and how they have been integrated into trade and competition policy. This book will be of significant interest to students of international business, professors of economics, law and business, and policymakers at the intersection of trade, investment, competition and property rights.

Current Directions in Postal Reform brings together leading practitioners, worldwide postal administrations, and the courier industry as well as a number of regulators, academic economists, mailers and lawyers, to examine some of the major policy and regulatory issues facing the postal and delivery industry. Issues addressed include international postal policy; the universal service obligation; regulation; competition, entry, and the role of scale and scope economies; the nature and role of cost analysis in the postal service; productivity; interaction of law and economics; and service standards.

The book is divided into three major sections. The first presents a theoretical discussion that underlies the other essays. The second section deals with privatization issues from the perspective of the United States. The third describes research addressed to the U. K. and Canada. In the first chapter, Richard Zeckbauser and Murray Horn develop a wide-ranging theoretical framework for assessing the capabilities and role of state-owned enterprises; it provides a foundation for the analyses that follow. In The Control and Perfonnance o[ State-Owned Enterprises , they describe state-owned enterprises as an extreme case of the separation of ownership and control. The focus is on management --the incentives it faces and the conflicts to which it is subjected. The distinguishing characteristics of public enterprise, the authors suggest, give it a comparative advantage over both public bureaucracy and private enterprise in certain situations. They argue that legislators are more likely to prefer SOEs over private enterprise when the efficiency of private enterprise is undermined by regulation or the tbreat of opportunistic state action, when the informational demands of subsidizing private production to meet distributional objectives are high, when it is difficult to assign property rights, or when state ownership is ideologically appealing. These considerations suggest why SOEs are usually assigned special rights and responsibilities, and they help explain observed regularities in the distribution of SOEs across countries and sectors. Zeckhauser and Horn apply principal-agent theory to identify the key factors underlying the performance of state-owned enterprises.

? In his "Prime ricerche sulla rivoluzione dei prezzi in Firenze" (1939), Giuseppe Parenti, by Fernand Braudel regarded as an author who "se classait, d'entree de jeu et sans discussion possible, a la hauteur meme d'Earl Jefferson Hamilton. . . . " begins his opening lines with a description/de?nition of the price revolution which took place in the XVI in Europe as "that extraordinary enhancement of all things that occurred in European countries around the second half of the XVI; revolution in the true meaning of the word, as not only, like any strong price increase, it modi?ed the wealth distribution process and changed the relative position of the various social categories and of the different functions of the economic activity, but affected too, in a way that was not enough studied yet, the relative evolution of the various national economies, and ?nally, . . . . . . . . . ., certainly contributed to the birth, or at least to the dissemination, of the new naturalistic economic ideas, from which the economic science would have sprung." De?nition that can be taken as the founding metaphor of this volume."

The manuscript reviews some key ideas about artificial intelligence, and relates them to economics. These include its relation to robotics, and the concepts of synthetic emotions, consciousness, and life. The economic implications of the advent of artificial intelligence, such as its effect on prices and wages, appropriate patent policy, and the possibility of accelerating productivity, are discussed. The growing field of artificial economics and the use of artificial agents in experimental economics is considered.

This volume is a compilation of essays by prominent economists in the area of household and family economics. The volume attempts to cover some areas in the field and focuses on topics such as income determination and the intergenerational transmission of income generation, the changing role of women in the labor force, fertility, and income tax treatment of the family. Each essay is followed by a discussion of part, or all, of its contents.

On May 20, 1976, the Economics Department of the City College of the City University of New York held its fourth annual conference. Eight papers followed by eight com ments were delivered on the topic of "Economics of Informa tion." These papers and comments are published in this volume along with a brief introduction. This publication has been made possible by income from the Harry Schwager Fund. My colleagues in the Economics Department have been generous when called upon to read and evaluate the papers. Professor Morris Silver, chairman of the department, was helpful at each stage of the project. Bob Leiter, my colleague and joint editor of these papers, died on August 19, 1976, while we were in the process of editing this volume. He was instrumental in organizing the Economics Department's annual conferences from their beginning in 1973 and for editing or jointly editing the con ference volumes. The Economics Department's Memorial Resolution, which follows, best expresses our sense of loss at his premature death."

1. THE PROBLEM OF CATASTROPHE RISK The risk of large losses from natural disasters in the U.S. has significantly increased in recent years, straining private insurance markets and creating troublesome problems for disaster-prone areas. The threat of mega-catastrophes resulting from intense hurricanes or earthquakes striking major population centers has dramatically altered the insurance environment. Estimates of probable maximum losses (PMLs) to insurers from a mega catastrophe striking the U.S. range up to $100 billion depending on the location and intensity of the event (Applied Insurance Research, 2001).1 A severe disaster could have a significant financial impact on the industry (Cummins, Doherty, and Lo, 2002; Insurance Services Office, 1996a). Estimates of industry gross losses from the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 range from $30 billion to $50 billion, and the attack's effect on insurance markets underscores the need to understand the dynamics of the supply of and the demand for insurance against extreme events, including natural disasters. Increased catastrophe risk poses difficult challenges for insurers, reinsurers, property owners and public officials (Kleindorfer and Kunreuther, 1999). The fundamental dilemma concerns insurers' ability to handle low-probability, high-consequence (LPHC) events, which generates a host of interrelated issues with respect to how the risk of such events are 1 These probable maximum loss (PML) estimates are based on a SOD-year "return" period."

89 TABLE 5 USE OR PLANNED USE OF MAJOR ENGINES IN AIR FORCE AND NAVY AIRCRAFT a Engine Air Force Aircraft Navy Aircraft F-80, T-33, XF-92, YB-61, AJ2, F9F-7, TV-I, J-33 YB-62, F-94 (A, B), TM- T2-V, P4M-I 61 ( tactical missile) X-3, XF-88 F3D, F2H, F6U, F7U J-34 F-84 (B, C, D, E, G, H) J-35 FJ-I B-45, XB-51, XF-9J, B-36, J-47 B-47, F-86 (D, F, K) J-48 F-94C F9F J-57 B-52, YB-60, F-lOO, A3D, F4D, F8U F-I02A, F-I0l (A, B), SNARK, F-105A, F-I07, KC-135A, B-57D, X-16 F-84F, B-57 FIIF, A4D, FJ-3, J-65 FJ-4, F9F YQ-l, YQ-2, T-37 J-69 SNARK, YF-89E, B-66 J-71 F-I01, F-I02B, F-I05, J-75 F-I07 F8U, XP6M B-58, F-I04, F-IOIA (see J-79 note c, Table 4) F5D, FIIF, A3J, F4H T-34 C-133A, YC-97J, YC-12IF R7V-2 XF-84H T-40 R3Y, XFY, A2D YC-130, YC-131C T-56 Note: a Aircraft in which engine was used or was planned to be used. For at least one (and generally more) of the aircraft in the list associated with a given engine, the decision to use the engine was made when the engine was in the final stages of develop ment. (In the case of the J -57, J-79, andJ-75 this is true of nearly all the aircraft listed. ) No Jist extends beyond 1956. Summary For an engine developed independently of an airframe the de veloper may constrain the performance, weight, and size of an engine at the start."

Competitive Transformation of the Postal and Delivery Sector is an indispensable source of information and analysis on the current state of the postal and delivery sector. It offers current insights of leading researchers and practitioners into strategy and regulation as well as the economics of this sector. Issues addressed include national and international perspectives, financial viability, the universal service obligation, regulation, competition, entry, the role of scale and scope economies, the nature and role of cost and demand analysis in postal service, productivity, interaction of law and economics, human resources, transition and reform issues. The papers in the book were selected from the papers presented at the 11th Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics, Toledo, Spain, June 4-7, 2003.

Studies in Consumer Demand - Econometric Methods Applied to Market Data contains eight previously unpublished studies of consumer demand. Each study stands on its own as a complete econometric analysis of demand for a well-defined consumer product. The econometric methods range from simple regression techniques applied in the first four chapters, to the use of logit and multinomial logit models used in chapters 5 and 6, to the use of nested logit models in chapters 6 and 7, and finally to the discrete/continuous modeling methods used in chapter 8. Emphasis is on applications rather than econometric theory. In each case, enough detail is provided for the reader to understand the purpose of the analysis, the availability and suitability of data, and the econometric approach to measuring demand.

Firms do not patent every invention. In many cases they rather rely on trade secrecyorothernon-legalmeanstoprotecttheirintellectualproperty, i. e. the returns on their investments in research and development (R&D). A patent confers to its ownerthe exclusiverights to prevent third parties frommaking, using, o?ering for sale, selling, or importing for these purposes the patent protected product (Art. 28, Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Int- lectual Property Rights (TRIPs)). In exchange for the temporary monopoly which is securedby this protection, the patentee has todisclose the invention in a manner su?ciently clear and complete for it to be carried out by a p- son skilled in the art (Art. 83, European Patent Convention (EPC)). Thus every patent has the drawbackof a possible loss of a technologicalleadership caused by the mandatory disclosure of formerly proprietary knowledge. The patentee has to fear that this transfer of enabling knowledge included in the patent description may bene't his rivals by facilitating their rapid catch-up. The relevance and actual enforcement of the disclosurerequirement is und- lined by the European Commission's Green Paper on Innovation (European Commission (1996)). In the so-called Route of Action 8 on the promotion of intellectual and industrial property it is stated that a desirable action should be the"promotion of patent information services as a method of technology watch based, in particular, on the information system set up by the European Patent O?ce"(European Commission (1996), p. 42).

The main objective of this book is to restate the important theories and evidence from economic analysis concerning intergovernmental fiscal issues. More importantly, the second objective of the book is to identify gaps in knowledge, empirical uncertainties, and missing theoretical structures and then to establish a preliminary agenda for new research on this topic. The book is organized in two sections. The first covers the core body of intergovernmental fiscal relations, including optimal size for jurisdictions and assignment of public sector functions, the formulation and execution of tax policy in an intergovernmental setting, and the appropriate structure and use of intergovernmental transfers. In the second section, the core knowledge is applied to four major policy areas: education, welfare, fiscal interaction in urban areas, and economic development. In thinking about a new research agenda, the authors call for more current and authoritative estimates of fiscal incidence, including interjurisdictional spillovers, for more fundamental research about the federation process and effects of consolidation, for new evidence about the long run, general equilibrium effects of interjurisdictional competition, and for basic research about the choice process and establishment of intergovernmental fiscal institutions and policies by federal and subnational governments.

Consumption takes place in settings or environments which have both direct and indirect effects on its dynamic path. Direct effects of environments on activities in consuming can occur through constraints that environments impose. Environment can also have indirect effects on consumption through enduring modification of internalized constructs which enter heuristics for decisions on activities. The importance of environments to consumption is increased by the definitional dependence of status on the judgements of others. This study examines microprocessing in consumer activities for status as it interacts with structure in the environments of these activities. The importance of environments in status activities provides the basis for a seperate, but related inquiry into observed differences in the form they take across societies. Conjecture on the consequences of differences in the structure of environments for consumption that typify a society is studied in the narrative statements by members of comparison societies and in the content of print advertising in these societies.Evolutionary processes which could establish observed differences in structure across societies are also considered in both their systematic and random components. I review models of random drift and stochastic resonance as candidate forms for generating observed structure in environments. Directions for the subsequent study of status through consumption are discussed.P * Introduction: Status Through Consumption; * Knowledge Use in Nonwork Activities for Status; * Interactions of Consumer Microprocessing and Structured Environments: Activity Feedback and the Stability of Structure; * Awards and Honors Systems in Structured Environments: Cross Societal Comparisons of Narrative Statements on Consuming for Status; * Comparative Analyses of Consumption Appeals in the Print Advertising of the USA and France, 1955-1991 * Random Process in the Generation of Structured Environments; * Overview and directions for Study of Status Through Consumption.

This book is based on two seminars held at Rutgers on October 22, 1993, and May 6, 1994 entitled 'Incentive Regulation for Public Utilities'. These contributions by leading scholars and practitioners represent some of the best new research in public utility economics and include topics such as the theory of incentive regulation, dynamic pricing, transfer pricing, issues in law and economics, pricing priority service, and energy utility resource planning.

1.1 Utilitarian Theories This book is a monograph on moral philosophy and social philosophy, particularly the part of the philosophy of economics that is related to the general distribution problem. It presents a comprehensive ethical theory, together with an application of the theory to distributive justice. The viewpoint of this theory is utilitarian. However, this theory is different in some crucial points, as well as in minor details, from all existing forms of utilitarianism. Moral philosophy deals essentially with the moral judgment of actions, i. e., whether a moral action is right or wrong, good or bad. The judgment is usually based on a line of logical reasoning, which can be traced to a final reason called the justification or ultimate principle. An ethical theory is a self-consistent system built upon a basic, or ultimate, principle. An ultimate principle can never be rigorously proven, and is not unique. Different philosophers establish different ethical theories upon different principles. Therefore, in the history of development of moral philosophy, there have been a large number of ethical theories and schools. Even wi thin the same school having the same ultimate principle, different philosophers may have different versions of the theory, because of small variations in the interpretation of the ultimate principle or in the elaboration of the details.

THE JANUS-FACE OF RACE: REFLEC- TIONS ON ECONOMIC THEORY Patrick L. Mason and Rhonda Williams Many economists are willing to accept that race is a significant factor in US eco nomic and social affairs. Yet the professional literature displays a peculiar schizo phrenia when faced with the task of actually formulating what race means and how race works in our political economy. On the one hand, race matters when the dis cussion is focused on anti-social behavior, social choices, and undesired market outcomes. Inexplicably, African Americans are more likely to prefer welfare, lower labor force participation, and unemployment. On the other hand, race does not matter when the subject of discussion is economically productive or socially accept able activities and legal market choices (for example, wages and employment). This Janus-faced construction of race is maintained by economists' stubborn ad herence to the market power hypothesis. The market power hypothesis asserts that racial discrimination and market competition are inversely correlated. Discrimina tory behavior will persist only in those sectors of society where the competitive forces of the market are least operative. When applied to the labor market, the mar ket power hypothesis suggests that pre- and post-labor market decisions represent disjoint sets. On average, members of a disadvantaged social group may accumulate a lower amount of or a lower quality of productive attributes because of discrimina tion in marital, residential, or school choice, or because of substantial animosity in day-to-day interpersonal relations with members of a privileged group.

The u.s. government bulks large in the nation's financial markets. The huge volume of government-issued and -sponsored debt affects the pricing and volume ofprivate debt and, consequently, resource allocation between competing alternatives. What is often not fully appreciated is the substantial influence the federal government wields overresource allocation through its provisionofcreditandrisk-bearing services to the private economy. Because peopleand firms generally seekto avoid risk, atsomeprice they are willing to pay another party to assume the risk they would otherwise face. Insurance companies are a class of private-sector firms one commonly thinks of as providing these services. As the federal government has expanded its presence in the U.S. economy during this century, it has increasingly developed programs aimed at bearing risks that the private sector either would not take on at any price, or would take on but atapricethoughtto besogreatthatmostpotentialbeneficiarieswouldnotpurchase the coverage. Today, roughly three-fifths of all nonfederal credit outstanding is 1 assisted by some form of federal program. The federal government provides insurance of many private pension plans through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, subsidizesand implicitly guarantees the liabilitiesofseveral agencies dominating secondary loan markets (for example, the Federal National Mortgage Association, Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, and Student Loan Mar ketingAssociation), andeithermakesdirectloansorguaranteesprivatelygenerated loans through a varietyofcreditprograms to farmers, exporters, home purchasers, and others."

Postal and Delivery Services: Delivering on Competition is an indispensable source of information and analysis on the current state of the postal and delivery sector. It offers current insight into strategy, regulation as well as the economics of this sector. Issues addressed include international postal policy, the universal service obligation, regulation, competition, entry, the role of scale and scope economies, the nature and role of cost and demand analysis in postal service, productivity, interaction of law and economics, human resources, transition and reform issues.

Effects of Deregulation on Safety provides a comprehensive overview of the safety experiences of these three case study industries and their implications for the U.S. nuclear power industry. The treatment of the subject is not highly technical, and hence is accessible to a wide range of readers with interests in the subject matter. The book draws on literature from roughly 250 references, ranging from brief news articles to book-length studies of deregulation in a particular industry, as well as original in-depth interviews with representatives of all three case study industries. This wealth of empirical background information allows the book to go beyond mere speculation about the possible adverse safety consequences of deregulation, to identify situations in which particular adverse safety consequences actually occurred. The experience of the case study industries indicates that economic deregulation need not be incompatible with a reasonable safety record, especially in those aspects of safety that are positively related to productivity. But that safety also cannot be taken for granted after deregulation. Careful management attention is needed in order to avoid the types of safety problems that were associated with deregulation in the case study industries.

Two related trends have created novel challenges for managing risk in the United States. The first trend is a series of dramatic changes in liability law as tort law has expanded to assign liability to defendants for reasons other than negligence. The unpredictability of future costs induced by changes in tort law may be partly responsible for the second major trend known as the liability crisis' - the disappearance of liability protection in markets for particularly unpredictable risks. This book examines decisions people make about insurance and liability. An understanding of such decision making may help explain why the insurance crisis resulted from the new interpretations of tort law and what to do about it. The articles cover three kinds of decisions: consumer decisions to purchase insurance; insurer decisions about coverage they offer; and the decisions of the public about the liability rules they prefer, which are reflected in legislation and regulation. For each of these three kinds of decisions, normative theories such as expected utility theory can be used as benchmarks against which actual decisions are judged.

Leon N. Moses In June 1991, the Transportation Center at Northwestern University sponsored Hazmat Transport '91: A National Conference on the Transportation of Hazardous Materials and Wastes. The faculty associated with the center were aware that there had been many professional, industrial and government conferences and meetings on the subject. However, they believed that the unique capacity of the Transportation Center to bring together leaders from industry and government, as well as leading scholars from economics, law, engineering, psychology and sociology who have done research on the problems associated with the transportation of hazardous materials and wastes (hazmats), could produce a set of integrated insights and understandings that would go well beyond those of previous conferences. The papers that make up this volume were all delivered at Hazmat Transport '91. From a legislative point of view, they tend to deal with issues associated with the Hazardous Materials Transportation Act of 1975 (HMTA), the original act passed to regulate the transportation of hazardous materials, and the Hazardous Materials Transportation Uniform Safety Act of 1990 (HMTVSA). There were talks and papers presented at the conference that focused on other recent legislation and transportation issues with which HMTUSA does not deal. The conference proceedings volume also had discussions and papers on significant managerial and regulatory issues that could not be included in this volume because of constraints on its size. Therefore, this essay is made up of three parts.

Over the past thirty years, urban economic theory has been one of the most active areas of urban and regional economic research. Just as static general equilibrium theory is at the core of modern microeconomics, so is the topic of this book - the static allocation of resources within a city and between cities - at the core of urban economic theory. An Essay on Urban Economic Theory well reflects the state of the field. Part I provides an elegant, coherent, and rigorous presentation of several variants of the monocentric (city) model - as the centerpiece of urban economic theory - treating equilibrium, optimum, and comparative statistics. Part II explores less familiar and even some uncharted territory. The monocentric model looks at a single city in isolation, taking as given a central business district surrounded by residences. Part II, in contrast, makes the intra-urban location of residential and non-residential activity the outcome of the fundamental tradeoff between the propensity to interact and the aversion to crowding; the resulting pattern of agglomeration may be polycentric. Part II also develops models of an urbanized economy with trade between specialized cities and examines how the market-determined size distribution of cities differs from the optimum. This book launches a new series, Advances in Urban and Regional Economics. The series aims to provide an outlet for longer scholarly works dealing with topics in urban and regional economics.

Small Is Beautiful is Oxford-trained economist E. F. Schumacher's classic call for the end of excessive consumption. Schumacher inspired such movements as "Buy Locally" and "Fair Trade," while voicing strong opposition to "casino capitalism" and wasteful corporate behemoths. Named one of the Times Literary Supplement's 100 Most Influential Books Since World War II, Small Is Beautiful presents eminently logical arguments for building our economies around the needs of communities, not corporations.